Culloden Moor Caravan Club Site, Morayshire

11 August 2017:- We are on track with my travel itinerary for Inverness and surrounds; a most satisfying feeling. This is not to suggest that one should only have five touring days here; better to have a couple of weeks and extend beyond my list of must-sees. But if as limited as we are, I reckon you could follow our steps and feel equally happy you had “done” Inverness as far as a reasonable person could.

Today’s weather forecast was the least favoured, so it seemed a good day to experience the worst on Culloden Moor where the last battle on British soil was played out. To explore this on the most perfect day summer would somehow seem irreverent.

With the Centre just a mile or less down the road from our camp, we were there soon after the early opening time of 9 am. The car park was quickly filling, tour busses included; this was a place to be shared with the masses; we were mentally prepared.

Remarkably and most fortunately, this is a National Trust of Scotland managed property; hence our own entrance was just a flash of our membership card. (I have yet to prepare some sort of spread sheet to ascertain all the money we have saved by our annual membership, something Chris has suggested would be of interest. For now my data is too precious to be going back over properties to ascertain the entry fee had we not been members, so I suspect I shall not be bothering.) 

Right here on this windswept moor, no less windswept today, on 16 April 1746, Culloden was the scene of the battle to finally subdue the Jacobite cause and become a pivotal point in the history of Scottish history.

The year before, Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart, grandson of James VII and son of the Old Pretender, James VIII of Scotland and III of Britain, arrived in Scotland to rustle up support to overthrow the monarchy of Great Britain. His support came from likeminded souls in Ireland and England, Scotland and France, the latter having an ulterior motive but proving to be tardy in the material support promised.

The stories of the uprising and battles fought are bloodthirsty, gruesome, tragic and memorable, finally culminating in this Battle at Culloden between a weary and hungry Jacobite army and a better prepared and sustained government force under the Duke of Cumberland, favourite son of George II and known thereafter as ‘The Butcher’.

Bonny Prince Charlie, as he has gone down in history, survived the battle, leaving 1,500 of his soldiers dead in battle, or hacked up immediately after, suggested all the surviving supporters go home to what was left of their families, and fled into hiding, finally arriving back on mainland Europe and slowly drinking himself to death; not so Bonny after all.

The National Trust can be very proud of the superb visitor centre they have built on the battle site, with state of the art audio-visual and interactive technology, all employed to tell of the tragedy, through words, songs, films and interpretative panels. Outside one can wander about the battlefield, where there was little left even within days of the battle because the looters and human vultures moved in within hours. More recent metal detecting types have turned up a multitude of metal objects missed by the scavengers, and records from the past have helped put the display together. 

Historians believe that around seven hundred Jacobite soldiers were killed or wounded within the first few minutes of the hand to hand fighting. The open flat ground of Culloden Moor was totally unsuitable for the Highlander’s style of courageous but undisciplined fighting, which needed steep hills and lots of cover to provide the element of surprise. Here there was none of that, hence their appalling defeat.

Out on the moor, accessed by one of the several gravel tracks for the tourists to follow, is a cairn erected by Duncan Forbes in 1881 to memorialise his kinsmen, placed in the care of the Trust in 1944. There are simple headstones all about, marked with the names of the clans and numbers belonging to each clan who were estimated to have lost their lives here. 

The later spin off of this event, apart from the retreat of Charlie Boy, was that hundreds of Jacobite prisoners were deported to plantations in North America and the Caribbean. Government forces rampaged through the country looking for survivors, murdering and looting, burning and destroying people and their livelihoods. Is it any wonder that the Scots with long memories have little time for the English, although I so believe that Queen Victoria’s romantic embrace of all things Scot went a long way to heal the rift. The more recent government devolvement is more likely to have undone any good work the fat widowed queen might have done. This is only my opinion and not an official line. 

The wind had not abated, nor the rain arrived. It seemed as if we could pursue other touring goals, but I was hungry and Chris was not keen to sit in the middle of the busy car park for lunch. We decided to backtrack a little toward our camp and check out the Clava Cairns marked with a brown tourist attraction sign on our access road. 

I was amazed to find that there were many others who thought to check this out too; the short distance off the more major road is narrow and not really suited to the numbers of mad tourists we saw today. Not only are there the cairns to explore, but the road adjacent offers a wonderful view point for the Nairn Viaduct, the rail bridge I had spotted the day we arrived and had hoped to get more up and close and personal to.

Balnuaran of Clava Cairns is a prehistoric cemetery, built between three and four thousand years ago. The oldest are circular walled enclosures; the central ring cairn and two passage graves. The largest was a ring of boulders that enclosed a grave, the kerb cairn. Such Bronze Age monuments are a feature of the inner Moray Firth and these are the best preserved examples.

More recent research has revealed, or suggested, a new complexity to the construction of these cairns. It seems the builders of the cairns considered the light of the sun and the colour, shape and texture of the stones. It was discovered that each tomb was short lived and may have housed very few bodies, perhaps only one, and that these were not accompanied by any offerings that survive today, as are found in many other prehistoric burial spots.

In the 1870s the monuments were interpreted as druid’s temples and in keeping with Victorian romanticism, the owner planted a grove of trees enclosing the three largest monuments, which now give the area a park-like feel.

We came away delighted to have fallen upon the site, one unplanned and hunger driven; does it matter the motivation?

There were a couple of items we had on our list for the city of Inverness, both these beyond the immediate centre, so we decided to check these out during the afternoon. We drove to Bught Park, an area on the north west bank of the River Ness set aside for sport and leisure, and parked along the street. From here we set off to the river, crossing the first of many suspension bridges to the Ness Islands. 

An extensive network of footpaths cover the several wooded islands situated right in the middle of the river, effectively creating linking foot paths for locals from one side of the river to the other.  We did not spend long here, although long enough to realise that the river seemed to divide into a multitude of ribboned waterways, working itself around the odd shaped outcrops.

Our plan was to continue from here, walking upriver into an area called Canal Park on our map, then walk down the towpath on the southern bank of the Caledonian Canal, hopefully reaching the series of locks we had noted when returning from our trip to Glen Affric.

Alas the map did not reflect the current bridge construction and related closures of roads, pathways and accesses. We ended up walking three times as far as we might have otherwise, trying to find our way to the Tomnahurich opening bridge. I was worn out before we reached the start of the canal walk, so our progress was slow.

The Caledonian Canal is the waterway linking the east and west coasts, assisted greatly by the natural waterways of the lochs that appear to cut the country into slices; Loch Ness, Loch Oich, Loch Ochy and Loch Linnhe. The canal was designed by Thomas Telford and opened in 1822 for commercial purposes but these days, is reserved for recreational users. The waterway links Fort William and Inverness, sixty miles apart and has twenty nine locks, but with a depth of only 4.6 metres, was always too shallow for most commercial shipping.

As evident from earlier parts of our travels, we do enjoy walking along canal towpaths, and Chris is always keen to look at the boats, preferably the eccentric and wonderful narrow-boats and barges. Today as we set off along the canal, we were disappointed to find only the one traditional looking canal boat; most were charter launches or ocean going yachts belonging to the more adventurous sailors who access the western coast of Scotland from Europe. We fell into conversation with one such chap at the locks; he and his mates were from Brittany and had spent many weeks sailing across from France, through the canal to Ireland, visiting Belfast and Dublin, and the Isle of Man. Their wives had flown across from France to join them for the more sedate stretches of their journey but were now about to fly home again to start work; their older retired husbands were enjoying a longer adventure.

We hung about the top two locks of the four Muirtown Locks for half an hour or so, then left the boaties to manage the rest without our scrutiny. These locks are manned by several chaps at the one time, hydraulic rather than the manual jobs we have seen in action further down the country, and the locks themselves hold a number of boats at any one time. This particular exercise we witnessed involved five yachts, four significant in size.

By the time we returned to the car, I was more than foot weary and it took more than a few minutes over a cup of coffee to face the preparation of dinner.